THE 3,549 E-MAILS in my inbox said more or less the same thing: that I was a despicable person. I refreshed the screen every few seconds—3,551, 3,558—the number was growing ever faster. A few of the e-mailers were disappointed but pragmatic about what had happened in the woods of rural Maryland. Some wanted to take me to court. Others promised me physical harm. They said I betrayed them, deceived them. The word choices, the frantic grammatical errors, and the heavy use of uppercase type were frightening indicators of how acutely I had enraged an entire subculture, a group of people who were actually defined by their collective urge to inflict pain on others. Within a few hours they had mobilized against me and I was running scared. E-mails came in waves that corresponded to time zones. Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific, from sea to shining sea. Then a second wave of venomous prose from Europe.
For a few weeks in July, I was the scourge of everyone who’d ever donned a gimp suit, brandished a bullwhip, or attached electrodes to a pair of testicles. The BDSM community wanted me dead.
I’d first heard of Leather Camp during a Nerve editorial meeting. Leather Camp is a five-day retreat in which extremely kinky people from the United States and abroad get together and enact their wildest fantasies. The idea was that I would attend and report back on the scene. Michael Martin was initially lukewarm about the idea, but I shot the organizer an e-mail expressing an interest in joining in anyway. He replied saying that Leather Camp doesn’t need publicity; that it sold out every year; that its location and schedule is a closely guarded secret; that he is trying to foster an environment free of judgment; that journalists are absolutely forbidden to attend.
“Now you’re definitely fucking going!” said Michael, suddenly adrenalized with intrigue. “What don’t they want people to know about? You are going undercover.”
None of the installments of my column had ever hinged on my using an assumed persona. Usually I was courted by companies to promote their products and services and, among a specific subset of people, my name had clout. I could help companies sell hundreds of chin-mounted dildos or bottles of supplements “specially formulated” to make one’s semen taste like applesauce, just by giving them a quick mention.
The brief was to go live among these folk at their summer retreat and report back on what I found. Should anyone ask, I was to tell them that I was attracted to BDSM and thought that Leather Camp would be a good way to find out what worked for me.
I had already delved into some BDSM-type activity in my column before now: I’d been shrink-wrapped in latex, infantilized by a dominatrix, and had seven shades of shit beaten out of me by a female wrestler. These articles were blogged—and usually ridiculed—on BDSM Web sites, so there was a fairly good chance that people might recognize my name. My pseudonym was Simon, which I thought went well with my accent. I have found that when forced to lie, keeping the lies parallel with the truth can help thwart revealing inconsistencies. To that end, I said that I was a customer service administrator, which I was up until twelve months earlier.
A portion of the Leather Camp Web site dealt with travel arrangements and carpooling. I ended up getting a ride with a guy called Manflesh. I traveled to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, to meet up with him at his parents’ home.
Manflesh was red-haired, soft-spoken, and in his mid-twenties. He had borrowed his parents’ vehicle for Leather Camp: a large silver minivan with a large disabled sticker on the back and a mechanism for getting wheelchairs in and out of it.
“Hey, for a minivan, this thing can really move,” he assured me, then faithfully observed the speed limit the whole way down past the Mason-Dixon Line.
The location of Leather Camp was shrouded in secrecy right up until the event, though it was always based within a two hour’s drive of Washington, D.C. Previous years had seen local communities getting wind of the goings-on at a Leather Camp event and arriving at the premises in heated protest, presumably with pitchforks and torches.
Manflesh astounded me with tales of Leather Camps past—this year was his sixth—until we were well into Delaware. Like the time he and all seven of his cabinmates kidnapped a bi-curious male (consensually, of course) and wouldn’t release him until he’d fellated them all. I imagine that his curiosity was quenched after that. Manflesh took a satisfied drag on a Parliament and looked longingly out the window.
“It was intense,” he said. “You know, for a beginner, you are taking on a lot by coming here. It’ll be a baptism by fire.”
“How do you mean?” I asked. I began to panic.
“Leather Camp is fucking hard-core. It’s no joke. That’s why we love it and you probably will too. It’s great because, for four or five days, it’s life as it should be: no rules, no judgments, no limits. But after four or five days, the weekend is over and—Bam!—it’s back to reality.”
At a typical BDSM event (bondage, domination, sadism, and masochism), Manflesh probably got more tail than I’d had in my entire life. He told me that he’d been whipped, flogged, pissed on, shat on, and generally bothered countless times since he discovered the scene at the tender age of nineteen. In fact, he was scheduled to give a two-hour tutorial on pissing that weekend. Last year, ten and one-third women showered him with golden degradation.
“One of the girls was three months pregnant,” he explained the fraction cheerfully.
This time around, Manflesh had rallied fifteen through a BDSM Web site; he assured me it was not to be missed. I took my Blimpie sub from my lips and gazed out the window, ruminating upon what the weekend would have in store.
I was in the death throes of a four-month relationship with Sophie. Sophie had some understandable misgivings about my attending a country retreat for sexual miscreants. Sophie was not really the jealous type, but her hormones were currently out of whack due to her being on fertility medication. She was “donating” her eggs.
I assured her that I was just going to be there in an observational capacity, though I really couldn’t gauge how I’d feel once I was there. I’d never been into the theatrical nature of the BDSM scene, though some of what Manflesh had said saying piqued my interest. Apparently, the previous year’s big hit was the “merry-go-suck-and-fuck,” in which eight “bottoms” assumed prone positions on a merry-go-round while a corresponding number of “tops” stood around the circle’s perimeter. Condoms were changed with every spin of the wheel.
As we headed closer to camp, the clouds cleared. In the final mile of our journey, we passed through a quaint little village that listed the times of church services on its welcome sign. There I was, driving in with a man who made the Marquis de Sade look like Pat Boone. Did Littlebrooke’s residents know that four hundred more of us were on the way?
We slowly pulled up the gravel driveway to the checkpoint, where two fifty-year-old women in Stars-and-Stripes T-shirts checked our credentials.
“Let’s see yer dicks!” one of them yelled.
“We gotta check that you ain’t vanilla!” said the other, laughing.
After three hours with Manflesh, I was feeling more vanilla than at any point in my life. He was poised to unbuckle his belt when a car came up behind us and we were waved into a parking area. About twenty-five yards from our car was a fifty-year-old man dressed as a little girl, with a bright red wig, pink dress, white knee-high socks, and Mary Jane shoes. He looked like a dry-cured Strawberry Shortcake. He skipped along the dirt road before hopping into a buggy and taking the reins.
“Hyah!” he squealed, jerking his steed into motion.
The steed was a sixty-year-old man. He wore a harness, black boots, blinders, a bit for his mouth, a butt plug replete with faux horsetail, and a cock ring. He pulled Strawberry Shortcake a few yards before the old man–little girl called out, “Whoa.”
The centaur obligingly came to a halt. While the passenger buckled his shoe, his horse whinnied loudly, thrashed his head back and forth, and dragged a foot along the ground.
Manflesh put my mind at ease when I confessed that I hadn’t brought any fetish wear whatsoever.
“That’s fine,” he said, “about half the people don’t. Leather isn’t a literal term. Leather is a state of mind, an umbrella term that covers all sorts of people who are into all sorts of things.”
As we loaded our luggage into a golf cart, I heard what I thought was a rifle range in the distance. As we trundled over the brow of a hill, I saw a large meadow dotted with several crucifixes. Attached to each was an individual being whipped, flogged, and/or beaten. It was just like that scene in Life of Brian. But instead of looking on the bright side of life, the whippees were emitting the most bloodcurdling screams I’d ever heard. The air was full of agony.
The camp was flanked by three hills and a small lake. Manflesh and I registered, got our cabin assignments, and went our separate ways. He had already secured a private cabin with several of the scene’s luminaries. Their cabin was called “Oink” because, as my new friend explained, “We’re all fucking pigs.”
I was assigned a cabin on the opposite end of the camp. It was about twenty feet by thirty, with ten stripped twin beds around the perimeter and some cubbyholes in the center of the room for personal effects. I thought I was the first to arrive, but in the far corner of the room lain a rotund blonde-haired woman in a pair of terry-cloth shorts and one white ankle sock. She was lying topless and facedown in a noisy slumber. My shuffling caused her to open her eyes slightly.
“Hi,” I whispered. “Sorry to wake you.”
She grunted and cut a spectacular fart that sent me scurrying outside for air.
From the porch of the cabin I saw a petite blonde woman leading around a huge, white, naked, entirely hairless man wearing a zippered gimp mask and “SLAVE” tattooed over his pubic bone. What was really unusual is that the gentleman seemed to lack any identifiable genitalia. In the area where one would normally find a penis, there was something that looked like the tied-up end of a balloon. His testicles were not in evidence. I wondered if he had tucked everything inside, like Samurai warriors did before going into battle. He was completely at the mercy of his owner: I saw her walk up to a swing and place a dog bowl full of a brown substance ten feet in front of it. Her slave got onto all fours and hungrily ate from it. At the end of her swing’s arc, his tormentor would spit, and her saliva would land on her slave or in his food. Every thirty seconds or so she would get off the swing, walk over to him, and flick her cigarette ash into his bowl for him to consume.
My cell phone didn’t work. I couldn’t unburden myself of any of the nightmarish vignettes being played out before me. I suddenly realized that, for perhaps the first time, I was truly alone. I ran across the camp to find Manflesh. He said that his crew was all around our age.
With the large, plushy pig toy on the veranda, cabin Oink wasn’t too hard to spot. Twenty paces from my destination, I was almost stampeded by a team of six “ponies” that were pulling a chariot at speed, provoking laughter from Manflesh and his cabinmates.
“You gotta watch out for that if you are going to last the weekend!” he called out.
Manflesh introduced me to a dozen of his friends, who were all very nice and had tons of questions about my kink, my sexual orientation, and my funny accent. There was Malcolm, a stout Uncle Fester type; Candy, a shy blonde woman in her late twenties; Julia and Dominique, two girls also in their twenties who could have been the two nerdy, spookily inseparable girls from any high school.
“How are you doing, Jeff?” called Manflesh to a man dressed up as a pony and being flogged nearby.
“Another day in paradise, man!” he answered as large welts began to appear on his back.
At that point, I’d been asked “Are you a top or a bottom?” at least ten times. I just said that I wasn’t entirely sure but hadn’t ruled anything out and that I expected the weekend to shed some light on things. That usually stopped people from digging much deeper and exposing me as an outsider. Having a shared history in the scene, everyone else had plenty to talk about. There were inside jokes, slang, and a lot of jargon I found hard to decipher.
“Have you seen Bolt-Thrower lately?”
“No, last I heard, he married Desire and disappeared off the scene. Moved to Tallahassee.”
I held up my end of a conversation by constantly asking for explanations. Everybody was talking about “doing a scene” with one person or another: “I’ve got a bondage scene with Cumbucket on Sunday at two, a humiliation scene with Donkey-boy on Friday morning.” They kind of scheduled them all in like power meetings.
With as much fanfare as he could muster, Manflesh produced his “new toy”: a 10,000-volt cattle prod designed for cattlemen involved in carrying out something called “close work.” I swallowed hard. The device emitted a soft buzzing sound, like that of a honeybee, which belied its ability to render a human being helpless and in unspeakable pain. Manflesh said he wouldn’t use the prod until somebody had used it on him first—he wanted to know what the pain would be like.
“I’ll do it,” said everyone in near perfect unison.
With about an hour to go before the opening dinner, I headed off to the pool. A huge majority of attendees at Leather Camp were older than my parents. Some were grandparents. Many were obese and leathery. There were about ten older walrus-people sitting on lounge chairs around the pool’s edge. A man who looked like Santa Claus stood next to my chair. In addition to his pillowy beard and trademark belly, he wore black sandals, orange-tinted aviators, and, most interestingly, a pair of assless hot pants showcasing an ornate barbed-wire cock ring.
By the time of my trip to Leather Camp, I had two years of immersive sexual research under my belt and had noticed several common themes among the attendees at these sorts of things, whether it be a trip to the nude beach, porn shoot, a sex party, or any other sociosexual event: people looked either like NASCAR fans or the sort of people who spent their weekends reenacting historical battles. They were almost always overweight, overtanned, and bereft of almost any body hair. Most interestingly, they would use any excuse to whip themselves and each other up into a nationalistic fervor. These people may have their genitalia unencumbered by clothing but would always be wearing hats or T-shirts with slogans like “Welcome to America, Now Speak English!” “These Colors Don’t Run” replete with weeping eagle/World Trade Center backdrop, or, most worryingly, “Nuke ’em All! (let Allah sort ’em out).” Manhattanites like myself could easily forget that, with every mile west beyond the Hudson River, this variety of American became more numerous and commonplace. To that end, these events don’t attract society’s misfits but rather the hoi polloi. In fact, the only demographic that’s notably lacking are urbanites.
I was walking to the cabin to change for dinner when Manflesh, Candy, and Malcolm appeared by the pool and started doing a scene about ten yards from where I was sitting. Malcolm was standing behind Candy, pulling her hair and biting her neck as Manflesh slapped her tits from the front. To my horror, Manflesh pulled out an ornate pocketknife that looked like a miniature scimitar. He crouched down, pulled up Candy’s skirt, and ran the blade over her exposed vagina. Candy was moaning and thrashing around; I couldn’t tell if she was actually being cut or not and I was about to pass out.
Manflesh looked over at me and smiled. I fumbled for my cell phone and had a pretend conversation while looking hard into the woods in the other direction. There was no way I was going to get involved in this. When I pretended to hang up, Manflesh was striding toward me. “You can get a decent signal here?”
“Er, yeah,” I said unconvincingly.
“Who is your service provider?”
It seemed like an extremely normal conversation to be having while a knife-point rape was being played out five yards from us. “T-Mobile.”
“That’s amazing. You must be the only one who can get service out here. May I borrow your phone for just a second?” I gave him my phone, thinking I had been truly caught out. My phone service was spotty in parts of Brooklyn. Miraculously, it worked, and after a brief conversation, Manflesh handed it back to me with a smile. “It’s time for dinner,” he said. Shell-shocked, I followed him, Malcolm, and Candy to the dining hall. The dining hall was the only place on the campground where a dress code was enforced. Genitalia and breasts must be covered.
On the ride down, Manflesh had told me to keep my expectations low about the camp cuisine, but dinner was actually quite enjoyable: two different types of salad, gammon steak baked with pineapple, sautéed potatoes, mixed winter vegetables, and orange sherbet for dessert. I sat with Manflesh and the others I’d met outside his cabin. During dinner, camp announcements were made by one of the event’s organizers, the charismatic Vincent.
Vincent had the best voice I’d ever heard. He sounded like a slightly deeper Lee Marvin. But announcements about general conduct depress the hell out of me, even when they’re delivered with a sub-bass cowboy drawl. “Do not have any open flame within ten feet of your cabin. Please clean up after yourself. We are not your mother,” and so on. Then Vincent started talking about his giant dick. You see, cabin decoration was one of the events at Leather Camp. A grand prize was offered at the end of the weekend. Vincent’s cabin had been festooned with a four-foot inflatable penis that had disappeared, and the theme of its return had worked its way into Vincent’s nightly dinner shtick. He reached into his pocket and counted some change. “A seventeen-cent reward for the return of my big dick,” he drawled. The diners erupted in laughter and applause.
I got up to leave and somehow got introduced to a couple in their forties. We shook hands, and in a Southern drawl the woman said, “I just love your accent! Bill, don’t you just love his li’l accent? Say, where are Ginny and Todd now? Bris-bane?”
“Cranbara,” the man said.
“Mel-borne?” she continued.
“It’s Cranbara.”
“Cairns?”
The couple went on to explain the finer points of the vacation on which they visited the Great Barrier Reef, Ayres Rock, Alice Springs, Sydney, Melbourne, and Canberra, saw crocodiles in the wild and visited an aboriginal village. Before I could get a word in, the husband was trying his best to pull his wife away. “I’m sorry, mate, will you excuse us?” said the woman apologetically.
Not having the heart to tell them I wasn’t, in fact, Australian, I offered them a hearty, “No worries, mate!” and made a break.
More and more people were arriving at camp, and the fervor was growing. I really got the feeling that people were grateful for the opportunity to come to Leather Camp. Old friends were being reunited all around me, catching up on subjects ranging from home improvement to the differences in the campsite from last year to this.
I snuck over to the pay phone and put in a call to my girlfriend. I missed her terribly. Some of the “I Did It for Science” assignments were contingent on having a significant other, some required an insignificant other, and a third grouping required me to be footloose and fancy-free. During Leather Camp I was in the death throes of dating Erica. During our tumultuous first five months, I had tried to induce a female ejaculation from Erica, had sex with her under the influence of five different narcotics in the space of one wacky weekend, and even had her accompany me to a gay bar, where I made out with twelve strange men, all in the name of experiential journalism. Erica was a good sport. Now, she was my only lifeline to the normal world.
I went back to the cabin to find a sunburned baby boomer having himself a stiff drink on the soft bunk next to mine. “Name’s Dan,” he said, extending his hand. “Havin’ fun yet?”
“Oh, sure,” I said.
“Ready for some vodka and ice?” he asked.
“Yep!” I said. Dan filled up half a sixteen-ounce cup with Absolut and threw in a little ice.
“See, I come from a long line of skydivers who say, ‘If you’ve survived the day, drink your ass off.’” Dan told me that he was a 743-jump veteran, and that skydiving was “the biggest fucking rush imaginable.” His speech was slurred and he could hardly walk.
I submerged my lips in the vodka.
Later, it was Fantasy Island night down at the swimming pool. The area was decked out Hawaiian-style: tiki torches, leis, fake palm trees, attendees in hula skirts and coconut bras. To rapturous applause, Vincent and another staff member arrived on a golf cart dressed as Mr. Roarke and Tattoo. Vincent took a stick from his bag.
“What’s this, Tattoo?”
“De cane, Boss! De cane!”
The crowd lost it.
When you’re in the countryside, the setting sun is the harbinger of lonesomeness. By nine o’clock, dinner had come and gone. Manflesh and his friends were nowhere to be seen; I had no one to talk to. I looked out at the crowd and saw people laughing, hanging out, embracing. It was then that a cute blonde girl, early twenties, ran across the pool area to join in the limbo competition. Out of six hundred people, she was singular in her attractiveness. I decided that would be my chance to make a connection. The limbo music started, and in front of hundreds of onlookers, I and fifteen others got ready to compete.
The cute girl was destined to win; that was clear from the start. She had captured the hearts and minds of the audience the moment she decided to remove an item of clothing every time she went under the bar. After the rest of us had been eliminated, she battled it out with a six-foot-four woman for supremacy. At that point, the blonde girl was totally naked, and the crowd shifted position to get a better view of her vagina as she made the winning pass. I stood near her pile of discarded clothes, which facilitated our meeting. She came up and shook my hand.
“You were great out there!” I said. She was in no hurry to put her clothes back on, even in the chilly night air.
“Thanks so much!” she said. “I’m a performer, a huge exhibitionist, and I’m also very supple. Wanna beer?” She produced two Coronas from her book bag. Her name was Aimee; she was twenty. Still naked, she chatted with me for a while.
Aimee beckoned some friends over and introduced me to them. They were a coed group in their twenties and thirties who weren’t scary at all.
“Oh oh oh!” said Aimee, flapping her arms around. “It’s time for s’mores by the campfire!” We rushed down the hill to a small lake, where a roaring fire was under way.
I NOTICED THAT “VIRGIN” was a word everyone liked to misuse and throw around there. The standard questions about what I was into identified me as a virgin. In fact, I was the virgin. Around the campfire, Aimee and her friends were conspiring.
“Are you into pain?” they asked me.
“Absolutely not,” I replied.
“How about some light bondage?”
Like lite cream and lite salad dressing, lite bondage sounded a lot less hazardous to my health. “Um, okay.”
“Goodie!” said Aimee, clapping.
“Why don’t we take him to the dungeon now?” asked Claudia.
Resistance was futile. Arm in arm, they led me to their cabin, where they picked up some toys, then we jumped in a golf cart and went to the dungeon. It was really chilly out, but I think my uncontrollable shivering was due more to nerves than anything else. Devirginizing people like me seemed to be a real treat for Aimee and Claudia. They could barely contain their excitement.
The dungeon was actually a gymnasium fitted with swings, suspension bars, stocks, and a contraption in the shape of an X that people could be tied to. As we entered, a woman screamed as her “play partner” used a lighter and aerosol can to send massive plumes of fire toward her body. Elsewhere, a man pressed a woman’s feet back to her shoulders while another gent slapped her vagina. Aimee and Claudia brought me to a padded table at the back of the dungeon. They told me to strip down to my boxers, then put a blindfold on me and cuffed me securely to the table.
Screams were coming from all corners of the room. Being blindfolded, I could only vaguely guess what was causing them. For the next twenty minutes, the girls gently flogged me, ran their nails over my skin, and tickled me with an oversized feather. It was about this time that I heard a third female voice hovering somewhere above me. Then I felt a heat source near my face, and a vaguely familiar smell. A vagina! From the razor-thin strip of vision my skewed blindfold gave me, I could see that the vagina did not belong to Aimee or Claudia, who were slipping my underwear off inch by inch. I sealed my mouth and turned my head like a toddler, refusing to eat. The mystery vagina got the hint and disappeared. I could hear more and more people around me. Aimee uncuffed my right arm and told me to jerk off for her. Despite what I could sense was a growing audience, I found this particularly easy to do. Three minutes in, Claudia removed my blindfold. I was masturbating for a crowd of fifteen men and women. Aimee was on all fours above me, her head down by my ankles, and her ass inches from my face. Claudia was torturing Aimee’s nipples with metal clamps. “You’d better come, Simon, or I’m going to pull blondie’s nips off,” said Claudia. Aimee shrieked in pain and sounded like she was beginning to sob.
“Come, come, come, come.” One of the audience members began the low chant, which the others picked up.
I pumped my fist mercilessly, knowing full well that it would take a while and that I could be an accomplice in Aimee’s disfigurement.
“Hurry up, Simon!” Aimee yelled.
The chanting got louder and faster. “Come, come, come, come!”
“I think that he wants to hurt you, bitch,” Claudia said to Aimee. “Do you like this?” she said, looking at me and slapping Aimee’s pert ass.
“Yes,” I said.
“Would it speed things up if it was in your face?” she asked.
I nodded and Claudia backed Aimee up then gently rubbed my testicles. I’d never cheated on a girlfriend before now. Not so much as kissed another girl, and here I was with my tongue in the ass of a blonde debutante while masturbating in front of a growing crowd as another woman held my balls with an iron grip.
“Come, come, come, come!” yelled the crowd, sounding angry now.
Finally I was done. Rapturous applause echoed around the gymnasium.
Claudia slid a finger through the pool of semen I’d deposited on my chest and put it into my mouth before she allowed me to get offstage.
“Well, what did you think?” Claudia asked.
“I thought it was very interesting,” I said. I wasn’t lying. After all that activity, I was bushed and ready for bed, but someone came up with the idea of going to the dungeon’s group grope room, where there were two adjoining inflatable beds, with some disposable paper play sheets in a box beside them.
Two guys and a woman were finishing up their scene, dutifully getting dressed and throwing away the paper sheets. Aimee laid out some new ones, and everyone else started making out and stripping. It was cold, so Aimee left her socks on. Within a few seconds, limbs were entwined in an eight-person clusterfuck. The people involved were arguably the youngest, leanest, and most attractive at Leather Camp, and within a few minutes a number of people put down their toys and piled into the room.
“Join in!” said Claudia, giving me a saucy wink and tugging at my penis. Mindful of my girlfriend, I inched to the back of the room to check out the scene with the other onlookers. I wasn’t aroused, exactly; more grateful to be included in the scene. There was no slapping, flogging, hot wax, or anything of that nature, just a good old-fashioned orgy: eight people looking to put the right parts in the correct places. Fifteen minutes later, it downsized into something that looked more like a group grope. “Aftercare,” as it’s known: following a scene, people reassure each other with cuddles and kisses. It kind of says, “Although I spent the past hour breaking your skin and calling you a filthy little whore, it was just pretend. We were just playing!”
I hardly slept a wink that night. Apparently I was assigned to the snorey cabin, where everybody else was at least twenty years my senior. I had finally gotten comfortable on the spiky, funny-smelling bedding when a bunch of people straggled in and flopped onto their beds, one by one. That, coupled with the numbing cold, meant that I was still awake by the time my cabinmates were getting up to greet the day. I was so cold and tired that I couldn’t be bothered to get up and put on more clothing. Although they were more pierced and tattooed than conventional baby boomers, the campers still had a propensity for getting up at 6:30 on the dot. Noisily, they arose and went out onto the veranda for cigs and coffee, finally allowing me a couple of hours of shut-eye. I woke at midday feeling like hammered shit.
“You didn’t miss much,” said Dan, who had come to the cabin to change into his birthday suit.
“Aside from three cute submissives jerking off some guy at the pool. He took ages to come, but he didn’t mind about that.”
“Um, is it warm out?” I asked.
“Well, it’s just warm enough to walk around naked, which I find is the best way to advertise,” he deadpanned, giving his considerable Johnson a wave, as if to prove his point.
Lunch was three different types of what was labeled as pizza. I sat down with Trevor and Claire, a couple from the monumental clusterfuck the night before. When not “in the moment,” they seemed shy. It was only Claire’s second event, and she was only marginally more in tune with the scene than I was. Trevor was worried he was about to be kidnapped.
Kidnapping is big at Leather Camp. You either had to consent to being kidnapped, or perhaps a partner or friend volunteered you for it. At some point, you’d be pounced upon by four or five assailants and receive an abduction made to order. It could be sexual in nature or just a good old-fashioned beating. Either way, Trevor was concerned that his kidnapping would come at an inconvenient time, like on the way to dinner or when he needed to go to the bathroom. He started getting animated and waving his arms around, spilling a cup of hot coffee that barely missed my lap. I didn’t know what had happened to my appetite, but I could barely eat anything.
The weather was overcast. Glancing at the schedule of events, I decided I would catch the two-hour “Takin’ It Up the Ass” tutorial, which was due to take place at 2:00. On the way out of the dining hall I bumped into Aimee, who was chatting to her boyfriend on the phone. He was turning up at camp tonight and she was terribly excited. Aimee was competing in the stripping contest that night, and she asked for my help in selecting a song and figuring out her choreography. Against my wishes, she picked Alannah Myles’s “Black Velvet” from the songbook. We went to the pool and I watched her dance/gymnastic routine take shape.
Satisfied with her moves, we headed up to “the Barn,” which was, as the name suggests, a barn. Inside, twenty people were sitting around looking bored and perplexed.
“This is a lot less stressful than a lot of other SM events,” explained Aimee. “Tutorials happen, or they don’t. Other events are more regimented, but this is like, ‘Fuck you, I’m on my vacation!’”
With the night’s theme being Mardi Gras, Claudia was running a mask-making competition. We ran over to the dining hall and got busy with the glitter glue, sequins, and feathers. While we tinkered with design concepts, the conversation turned to what other attendees had told friends and family about where they’d be that weekend. It was rare to hear people talk about the outside world, and I was happy they were. The premise of camp was that people could be “who they really wanted to be,” meaning that, for the most part, the trappings of the real world were checked at the front gate. I, for one, love the trappings of the real world. Without them to embrace or react against, I was getting really, really lonely. With my mask complete and Aimee running off to do a photographed “suspension scene,” I looked around camp for familiar faces, but again found no one.
I walked over to the lake’s edge, where a fire had been lit and deserted. I don’t like being alone. I’m not sure what’s scarier: asking a sixty-year-old guy dressed as Pippi Longstocking to pass the Elmer’s Glue, or sitting there by the lake with nothing but my thoughts. I hadn’t felt so isolated since I was a bus driver at the oil refinery about five years before. At least then I had a book, the radio, and the occasional grease monkey to chat with. But having to essentially fib to these people all day about who I was and why I was there was making me feel like I was without an identity. It seemed that the more people were into it, the more I was feeling left out. I’m sure that I could have gotten into more situations, but I found it hard to have common ground with people. If you want to know the truth, I almost had a little cry.
I wasn’t alone. A rustling in the bushes alerted me to the presence of three medievalists—one male and two female—caressing and canoodling together. The man was wearing Cossack boots, black jodhpurs, and a baggy shirt that looked like liquid chrome with a belt resting midway up his belly. The man gave me what I could only describe as a Shakespearean wave or hand flurry before turning back to his ladies and sipping some Bud Light, which he no doubt wished was ale or mead. Across the edge of the lake, a couple of guys—clothed and looking like civilians—were fishing for the elusive handful of bigmouthed bass rumored to be skulking around in the weeds. I took heart in the fishermen and a Cessna that flew overhead. All this sex, sex, sex was driving me absolutely crazy.
I found Claudia and Josh in the dining hall. In keeping with the Mardi Gras theme, shrimp gumbo, jambalaya, and corn bread were on the menu. In the buffet line, I stood next to a guy who was so manly he made the Brawny towel dude look positively fey. On his back was a woman of similar age—his partner or wife, I presumed. She was pretending to be his daughter, exhibiting the characteristics of a hyperactive seven-year-old girl and addressing the man as “Papa.”
As was becoming the trend, I put more on my plate than I was able to eat. Josh and Claudia introduced me to Martha, a smiley fifty-year-old with Farrah Fawcett hair.
“Oh, don’t tell me, you are a bottom, aren’t you?” she cooed. “Look at those wonderful baby browns! You wouldn’t hurt a fly, would you?”
I guess not. I tend to dislike pain, being restrained, or getting generally bothered; I would only give someone a sound beating if they stole my stuff. So I suppose I’m a bottom by default.
During dinner, Josh developed a pronounced facial tic, like his eye was trying to jump off his face. I hadn’t noticed it the night before. It seemed to happen every ten seconds and was accompanied by maniacal laughter from Claudia. It transpired that Josh was wearing a mini version of an invisible-fence dog collar around his cock and balls. Claudia held the remote control.
Vincent made his nightly announcements. The abductors of the inflatable dick had cobbled together a ransom note out of letters clipped from a newspaper. Vincent upped the reward for the dick’s return to forty-five cents. The dining room erupted with laughter and applause. Vincent then revealed why the “Takin’ It Up the Ass” seminar was a nonstarter.
Apparently some poor bugger had fainted and was carted off to the hospital in an ambulance. He had taken too much or not enough of his blood-pressure medication, and as an impossibly large object was inserted into a willing ass, he hit the deck faster than Anna Nicole Smith on a fistful of Vicodin.
There was another special announcement to be made: that day was the one-year anniversary of Peter and Madeleine, who had wed at Leather Camp last year. Applause all around. Peter then grabbed the mic and presented the camp organizers with a plaque conveying heartfelt thanks. It was really touching. The four of them got a two-minute standing ovation. I got a little choked up myself.
After dinner, everybody filed outside for the stripping competition. Aimee was the first contestant. She did a perfect dance, ending with a headstand, split, and precisely executed bridge. The crowd went apeshit. Peter was up next. Despite his formidable bulk, he did some tantalizing leaps and landed in a split, soliciting oohs and aahs from the audience. Perhaps the biggest crowd-pleaser was a man named “Pluto’s Revenge,” a six-foot-four member of the Oink cabin who wore a Mohawk, handlebar mustache, and wraparound shades. He threw his lanky frame around for two minutes while wearing a leather thong pouch. During the routine, he launched his sunglasses into the pool. For the finale, he recklessly somersaulted into the shallow end. When he didn’t come up for five seconds, everybody thought the worst. There was uncomfortable silence, then murmuring. But Pluto reemerged victorious. He was wearing the sunglasses and holding his marble sack high above his head.
Another routine of note was Samantha and Craig’s. As well as being boyfriend and girlfriend, they were both blonde, skinny, and tall. Dressed identically in pigtails and Catholic-schoolgirl uniforms, they did a naughty take on a mirror dance, backed by Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer (I Wanna Fuck You Like an Animal).” At the end, they writhed on a section of indoor-outdoor carpeting wearing nothing but knee-high boots.
It’s worth mentioning here that out of ten entrants in the stripping contest, six of them chose “I Wanna Fuck You Like an Animal” as accompaniment. After it was played three times in a row, the DJ declared the song banned. The other strippers were chagrined. “That’s fucked up!” one of them cried behind me. Attention was momentarily deflected from the stripping when a woman in a Mardi Gras mask and front-mounted dildo went down on a fellow audience member. The contest ultimately ended in a tie between Aimee, Pluto’s Revenge, and an Audrey Hepburn–type performer known simply as Dancer. Each prize was a bundle of Leather Camp dollars, which could be used at Casino Night or the next day’s slave auction.
Aimee’s boyfriend finally came to camp, and she couldn’t have been happier about it. They’d only been dating for a month, but she was already wearing a collar that indicated she was, in some way, his property.
After the stripping contest, I bumped into Claudia, and we strolled past the torch-lit pony races and down to the pavilion, where Casino Night was being held. Blackjack, poker, and roulette were being played at tables all around. Attendees wore differing degrees of fetish wear. I learned how to play blackjack and even came away with hundreds of (fake) dollars.
Being away from the city’s energy made me lethargic, and I was fading fast. In addition to breakfast, lunch, and dinner, a midnight snack was provided. That night it was cold cuts and rolls. I start talking to Claudia about how she got into the scene. She was really attractive and in her mid-twenties.
“I was a sorority girl,” she said and smiled. “That’s how I learned to top and bottom. It set me up for being a switch. I didn’t know it at the time, but a few years later something was definitely pulling me toward the scene.”
My curiosity was piqued, to say the least.
“But you know, I was a great pledge too,” she said. “I was all, ‘Yes, ma’am, yes, ma’am.’ I loved it, even the really evil shit.” Apparently, in one hazing ritual the pledges had to strip naked so the seniors could use a permanent marker to circle each girl’s less taut body parts.
I said good night and went back to the cabin. The remaining two unoccupied beds had been pushed together and an inflatable bed had been put over the top. Cliff and Liz were our cabin’s only couple. They were in their fifties, and they brought everything but the kitchen sink to camp: a night-light, two drink coolers, an electric blanket, a collapsible coat rack, a set of those plastic drawers on wheels with all sorts of medical and cosmetic supplies in them. The woman looked like Olive Oyl, and her husband was the spitting image of Mr. Kotter. I lay in bed wondering about their relationship. I wondered if there were vanilla couples where one partner had discovered the scene and the other just kind of went along with it. That’s how Olive Oyl seemed. She looked like she wanted to be anywhere else but in this cabin.
Unlike the night before, I fell asleep immediately. I kept my clothes on and used two towels as auxiliary blankets. It was still bone-chillingly cold, but at least Dan wasn’t making such a racket. I woke up at 6:00 on the dot, freezing. I went into the shower room and found that Cliff and Liz had even brought their own massaging showerhead. Unbelievable! I took advantage of their creature comfort and hung out under the shower for the better part of an hour. The majority of my cabinmates were still asleep. It was 7:30, and the rain outside was nothing short of torrential. Breakfast wasn’t served until 9:00, but the kitchen staff already had some coffee brewing while they prepared eggs, bacon, and oatmeal. I sat down at one end of the huge dining hall, the only person there. I started talking to a kitchen staffer who was wearing a David Beckham jersey. I guessed he was English, but he was actually from Poland, on one of those Camp America programs.
“I’m from Gdansk,” he told me in perfect English. Not only did Stacek nail my country of origin, but he could identify what region I was from by my accent.
“What do you think of America?” I asked him.
“I much prefer England,” he said. “This place is weird.” I hoped he had seen other things than camp. “Next week, there will be more people here that will be naked and having sex everywhere. It’s a strange place, America.”
“This isn’t normal,” I said.
I was about to argue the case for my adopted homeland, but as I opened my mouth, I caught sight of a sexagenarian male dressed as a female toddler and applying rouge at the other end of the dining hall. I shook hands with Stacek, the only person I had met outside of the scene in days, and I stared out at the gloom.
Before I’d left for camp, my editor had told me there were three categories of kids who went to summer camp. Some kids assimilate immediately, disappearing into the throng before their parents have left the parking lot. Others might feel lonely and uncool for the first few days before falling in with a like-minded crowd; they ultimately had to be dragged away. Then there are the kids who piss the bed and want to go home.
I had pissed the proverbial bed. As I sat in the dining hall, watching the rain drive against the window, I was overwhelmed by the need to leave. The continuing monsoon threatened to compromise the rest of the weekend’s events; it had driven people inside, into more intimate, insular activities. Everyone at camp seemed to be having the time of their lives, and I was not included. Not being straight up about what I was doing there was starting to become a massive burden; I would make a useless double agent. I just wanted everybody to get on with having fun.
As soon as I had made the decision to go, I felt a massive sense of relief. In fact, the end of every sexual situation related to the column was marked by a feeling of dread, anguish, and insecurity being suddenly lifted. Making a break from Leather Camp was that feeling multiplied by a hundred.
I ran through the downpour to camp HQ and checked in my bed linen. There were only two trains to New York that day, and I was determined to catch the earlier one. There was no precedent of people leaving camp before the diabolical activities had reached their heady zenith at the Renaissance Fair, and consequently the camp’s organizers were reluctant to let me go.
Jorge, one of Claudia’s crew, who I’d meet in the group grope, very kindly offered to drive me the twenty miles to the nearest train station, through torrential rain, after I’d explained that there’d been a family emergency that I had to get back for.
“Well, family is very important,” he said with his thick Venezuelan accent. “We’ll make sure you get back to New York okay.”
I got on the train, thankful that I’d made it back undetected and in one piece, though I doubted that I’d ever really be “okay” again.